Friday, April 15, 2016

Notify from Openhab using Cisco Spark

I'm using Openhab for my home automation for a couple years now and am very happy with it. One of the things it can do it notify you on various events around the house. I had XMPP configured to send messages to my Google account, but the last months this has been failing. Some error about pinning certificates. There's some information on the internet about how to solve this, but I'm using a Google account with a custom DNS name which seems to complicate matters a bit.

Since Cisco added APIs to the Cisco Spark service (try it!!), I wanted to use Spark instead for my notifications. The proper way of integration with Openhab is to develop an Openhab plugin, but I wanted something more versatile. So I started the development of a CLI interface for Spark: sparkcli. Let's get going!

Install and configure sparkcli

First download a copy of sparkcli here: . Make sure the binary is on the PATH for the OS user that's running Openhab. Typically /usr/local/bin will do just fine.